The Invention of Everything Else (37 page)

I felt the itch in my shoulder blades, and when I stood, I was quite lightheaded. A number of birds had settled themselves on the edge of the house. "Hello, dears." I joined them there. I studied their bones and feathers. They dove from the ledge, swirling through the dark sky of the street. I could feel a wind behind me, a breath asking me to take the last step forward, to fly.

This past week had been constructed of magic. Arthur, Azor, and Mr. Tesla had appeared, conjured from nothing. The wind blew and I lifted my arms. The wind came strong. I closed my eyes and saw the patterns the birds make in flight. Circles. I lifted one foot off the edge of the roof. I could join the pigeons. Anything is possible. My shoulder blades split. My arms raised higher as I leaned into the air four stories above the street.

"Louisa!"

Air is so curious, the something that is nothing.

"Louisa!"

I opened my eyes and pulled back. There he was. Again.

"Louisa!"

Where does wonder live? Here, Mr. Tesla would say. Wonder lives right here on Earth.

The sky was slipping into blue, though the sun was still a ways off. I could see him, a bag of groceries in one arm. I drew my foot back onto the roof.

"You came back."

"What are you doing?" he yelled, stirring some more of the birds into flight. I did not answer. I watched with Arthur as the pigeons soared and looped through the air between us. Purple, green, blue, red, gray. The birds dove together, each loop inseparable from the other, known, unknown, welcome. They rose and fell. They turned and disappeared like a flash of something that's hard to hold on to: hope, the past, lightning against the New York City sky.

Though sometimes it seems difficult to believe that such a fantastic inventor actually existed, Nikola Tesla was a real man. While this is a book of fiction, much of
The Invention of Everything Else
is drawn from the events of his life and the repercussions such a life had on later generations. In that regard I am indebted to many whose research came before mine. The Tesla biographies written by Margaret Cheney, John J. O'Neill, and Inez Hunt and Wanneta Draper were essential to my understanding of Tesla and wonderful places to turn for further reading.

Many, many thanks to Joseph Kinney, director of Property Operations and unofficial archivist at the Hotel New Yorker. He was a terrific help in re-creating the hotel as it might have been in 1943. Thanks also to Mr. Kinney for taking me on a tour of the closed parts of the hotel. These old boiler rooms, machine shops, bank vaults, and tiled tunnels have entered my dreams and indeed constructed a passageway back to 1943 for me.

John Wagner's tireless efforts in preserving Tesla's legacy inspired me. He also showed me how his ham radio works. Thanks.

Thank you, filmmakers Helena Bulaja and Natasa Drakula.

An early version of chapter 1 appeared in
Seed
magazine.

Pratt Institute granted me course-release time to finish work on the book, for which I am grateful.

Thank you most to the kind people who gave me encouragement, assistance, and love, especially Joe. Thanks always to Diane and Walter, and to my grandmother Norma Santangelo for explaining what
it was like to witness electricity the first time. Thank you to all the Hunts and the whole Nolan clan. Thanks to PJ Mark and Anjali Singh for such careful expertise. Thank you, Katya Rice and Will Palmer. Thanks to all the Hagans, Dori and Pop Pop, Terryl and Dodd Stacy, Lisl Steiner, Brian Blanchfield, Annie Gwynne-Vaughan, Annie Guthrie, and Amanda Schaffer.

Chapter 1

"Humanity will be like an antheap stirred up with a stick. See the excitement coming!"
New York Times,
March 27, 1904.

"radio is a nuisance..." Nikola Tesla,
Herald Tribune,
July 10, 1932.

"I would not suffer interference from any experts." Tesla,
New York Times,
January 8, 1943.

"Do we not look into each other's eyes and all in you is surging, to your head and heart, and weaves in timeless mystery, unseeable, yet seen, around you?" Goethe,
Faust.

Chapter 2

Orson Welles was of course responsible for the
War of the Worlds
broadcast.

Chapter 3

"Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sack and unbuttoning thee after supper

..." Shakespeare,
Henry IV.
"I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." In his book
Prodigal Genius,
John J. O'Neill writes that this is what Batchelor's letter of introduction, the one Tesla carried to Edison, said. "Batchelor, this is a damn good man." Reported by John J. O'Neill. "You've got a lot to learn about the American sense of humor." Reported by John

J. O'Neill.

Chapter 4

Azor's appearance on the radio show was inspired by a 1957 interview conducted by "Long John" Nedel with Otis T. Carr, a man who claimed to have invented a spaceship, on WOR Radio, New York.

Chapter 5

Sam's comments about bacon, abstinence, and Jane Austen come from Robert Underwood Johnson's account of Mark Twain in
Remembered Yesterdays.

"poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist etc. etc.!" The Sierra Club reports that John Muir once called himself this.

"Treacherous, contemptible spirit, and that you have concealed from me! Stay, then, stay! Roll your devilish eyes ragingly in your head..." Goethe,
Faust.

Chapter 6

"Aba Daba Honeymoon" by Fields and Donovan, 1914.

Chapter 9

"Open the second shutter so that more light may come in." Allegedly, these are Goethe's last words.

Chapter 10

"They borrow books they will not buy. They have no ethics or religions. I wish that some kind Burbankian guy. Would cross my books with homing pigeons." Many strange things happened while I was writing this novel. This was one of the strangest. I had heard about a woman named Margaret Storm who was part of a faction of people who believed that Tesla was from Venus. I heard she had published a book,
Return of the Dove,
about her theory, but when later researchers and publishers tried to find her they met a dead end. She had disappeared. I ordered her book off a rare-books website. When it arrived, I found, much to my surprise, that the entire text was printed in kelly-green ink! Even more wonderfully weird, the previous owner, a woman named LaFaye Fouts, had fixed the above pigeon bookplate, a poem by Carolyn Wells, inside the front cover. I had to look up "Burbankian," which led me to discover Luther Burbank, another scientist himself worthy of a novel.

Chapter 11

"Nikola Tesla is not an Earth man..." This quote is taken directly from Margaret Storm's
Return of the Dove.

Chapter 12

The conversation between Sam and Tesla when Sam is aboard the vibrating platform is taken from Tesla's own account and later reproduced by both John J. O'Neill and Margaret Cheney.

Chapter 13

Much of Tesla's telephone conversation about the Nobel Prize is drawn from quotes he gave to the
New York Times
when they incorrectly reported that he had won.

Chapter 15

"Remember My Forgotten Man" by Dubin and Warren, 1933. "Than beer there is no deeper brew..." This is a poem written by my own father, Walter Hunt, when he was in college.

Chapter 16

"The brain is not an accumulator." Nikola Tesla,
Electrical Experimenter Magazine,
May 1919.

Chapter 17

"Moonlight on the Ganges" by Wallace and Myers, 1926.

Chapter 18

"He Wears a Pair of Silver Wings" by Maschwitz and Carr, 1942.